n
1817, 22-year old James Harper and his 20-year old
brother, John, set up a small printing firm in New York
City called J. & J. Harper. Joined later by their
younger brothers, Joseph Wesley and Fletcher, the firm
became the largest book publisher in the United States
by 1825. The name was changed to Harper & Brothers
in 1833, and survives today as Harper-Collins.

Under Fletcher’s
guidance, the firm started Harper’s
Monthly in
June 1850. The first managing editor was Henry Raymond,
who soon went on to help found and then publish the New
YorkTimes. Harper’s
Monthly
became and still is an outstanding literary magazine.

The
ancestral seed for Harper’s
Weekly
germinated in 1842 in London when the management of the
London Illustrated News figured out how
to illustrate the latest news stories on a timely
basis. Traditionally, woodblock printing of
illustrations was a labor-intensive process requiring
three steps. First, a boxwood block, which was the
exact thickness of the type, was polished smooth. Next,
an artist used a pencil to draw his picture on the
block in reverse, creating a mirror image. Then an
engraver, using a graver and chisels, cut away all the
wood not covered by pencil lines.

The new technique, which enabled weekly news
periodicals to meet publication deadlines, involved
dividing the drawing into many pieces after it was
completed. The pieces were assigned to separate
engravers for each block; when completed the blocks
were reassembled and bolted together. Double-page
prints required up to 40 blocks. (The thin white lines
between blocks can be seen in some of the Harper’s
Weekly
illustrations.)

One
of the London Illustrated News engravers
in 1842 was 22-year old Frank Leslie (who was born
Henry Carter.) Leslie immigrated to the United States
in 1848, became associated with P. T. Barnum and then
worked on some unsuccessful illustrated periodicals as
an engraver. On December 15, 1855, he published the
first issue of Frank Leslie’s
Illustrated Newspaper
in New York.

Motivated
by the success of Leslie’s,
Fletcher Harper published the first issue of Harper’sWeekly
one year later on January 3, 1857. Harper’s
was aimed at the middle and upper socio-economic
classes, and tried not to print anything that it
considered unfit for the entire family to read. In
addition to the importance of illustrations and
cartoons by artists like Winslow Homer and Thomas Nast,
the paper’s
editorials played a significant role in shaping and
reflecting public opinion from the start of the Civil
War to the end of the century. George William Curtis,
who was editor from 1863 until his death in 1892, was
its most important editorial writer.

From its founding in 1857 until the Civil War broke
out in April 1861, the publication took a moderate
editorial stance on slavery and related volatile issues
of the day. It had substantial readership in the South,
and wanted to preserve the Union at all costs. Some
critics called it "Harper’s
Weakly."

Harper

’s
Weekly would
have preferred William Seward or possibly even Stephen
Douglas for president in 1860, and was lukewarm towards
Lincoln early in his administration. When war came,
however, its editorials embraced Lincoln, preservation
of the Union, and the Republican Party. Military
coverage became paramount in every issue, as its news
and illustrations kept soldiers at the various fronts
and their loved ones at home up to date on the details
of the fighting.

The following quotation from the April 1865 issue of
the North American Review shows how a
leading peer publication viewed the wartime
contributions of Harper

’s
Weekly.

"Its
vast circulation, deservedly secured and maintained by
the excellence and variety of its illustrations of the
scenes and events of the war, as well as by the spirit
and tone of its editorials, has carried it far and
wide. It has been read in city parlors, in the log hut
of the pioneer, by every camp-fire of our armies, in
the wards of our hospitals, in the trenches before
Petersburg, and in the ruins of Charleston; and
wherever it has gone, it has kindled a warmer glow of
patriotism, it has nerved the hearts and strengthened
the arms of the people, and it has done its full part
in the furtherance of the great cause of the Union,
Freedom, and the Law."

After the war, Harper’s Weekly
continued to be a major factor in Ulysses Grant’s
presidential victories in 1868 and 1872, the overthrow
of New York City political boss William Tweed in 1871
and the first election of Grover Cleveland in 1884. Its
circulation exceeded 100,000, peaking at 300,000 on
occasion, while readership probably exceeded half a
million people.

Thomas Nast’s devastating cartoons drew national
acclaim. As Boss Tweed said, "I don’t care so
much what the papers write about me ― my
constituents can’t read, but they can see them damned
pictures.”

In
1967, I founded an advertising research business and
was interested in old ads, especially those in Harper’s
Weekly. I
was fortunate to acquire a complete set of Harper’s
Weekly (1857
through 1916) in 1972.

As a retirement project, I decided to have this
uniquely important journal manually indexed. Harper’s
Weekly never
had a useful index, so until now there has been no way
for students and researchers to access the
illustrations, cartoons, news, literature, editorials,
and ads that these volumes contain without spending
hours poring over microfilm or locked-up original
copies in rare book rooms of libraries. Harper’s
Weekly is
really the only consistent, comprehensive, week-to-week
chronological record of what happened world-wide in the
last half of the nineteenth century.

The
reason for manually indexing Harper’s Weekly
is to put nineteenth century language, occurrences and
illustration content into twenty-first century
terminology. For example: Should the 1858 New Jersey
lady who owned a pistol be allowed to keep it? We index
that item under "Women’s rights," although
the term was not used in the 1858 article’s content.

Since 1995, up to 12 indexers with advanced degrees
have read every word and studied every illustration and
cartoon in Harper

’s
Weekly,
and have carefully constructed user-friendly indexes
that will guide you in locating information quickly and
concisely. The information is presented in an
easy-to-navigate, alphabetical, multi-level structure
familiar to scholars, reference librarians and students
alike. Descriptive sub-entries will help you determine
the relative value of the references by giving you
specific information about an entry prior to display.

The 56 years of Harper’s Weekly
provide a continuous record of what happened on a
weekly basis from 1857 through 1912. The first segment
includes the Civil War Era: 1857-1865. The next two
cover Reconstruction: 1866-1871 and 1872-1877. The last
six encompass the Gilded Age: 1878-1912.

I

n addition to
the manually created Thesaurus-based index, HarpWeek
has had the Full-text of Harper’s Weekly
typed and entered into an additional database. Clients
now have another way to explore the nineteenth century.

If "Haiti" doesn’t show up in Searchable
Full-text, try it in the Thesaurus-based index; (it was
spelled "Hayti" in the nineteenth century).
If First Lieutenant J. E. Tuthill doesn’t appear in
the Thesaurus-based index, try him in Searchable
Full-text.

T

he database is now complete and available to
clients.

Scholarship is
always an ongoing and interactive process. As you use
the index and the images, you may find what you
consider to be errors, or you may have suggestions. We
welcome any corrections or commentary that you care to
share with us. The HarpWeek index will be
updated periodically to reflect new information. Please
contact: support@harpweek.com